Notes of a forgotten past

Something Familiar

CHAPTER 3

Dante's POV

The office on the fourteenth floor of Moretti Acquisitions had a view of Milan that most men would have stopped to appreciate.

I never stopped to appreciate it.

I was at my desk by six in the morning the way I was every morning, going through numbers that didn't need me to go through them personally but that I went through anyway because control is not something I have ever been comfortable handing to other people. Moretti Acquisitions, on paper, was one of the most respected private investment firms in northern Italy. Clean books. Legitimate clients. A reputation built carefully over seven years by a man who understood that the best cover is one that actually works.

What the books didn't show was everything else.

The network that ran beneath the surface of the company. The men who reported to me not in boardrooms but in black rooms. The territories. The agreements. The particular kind of respect that is built not from admiration but from the understanding that crossing me would be the last interesting decision a person ever made.

I was the most feared man in the Italian underworld.

I did not say that with pride. I said it the way you state any fact. I am the man that other dangerous men are afraid of. It simply was what it was.

Marco appeared in the doorway at half past eight, tablet in hand, already dressed for the day in his dark suit. Marco Reyes had been with me for five years and he was the only person I trusted completely, not because I was sentimental about it but because he had earned it in ways that most people never get the opportunity to. He was efficient, loyal, and had the particular gift of knowing when to speak and when to stay quiet.

"The gala tonight," he said, stepping inside. "Everything is confirmed. Seating, schedule, the orchestra, security rotations, all sorted."

"Attendees?"

He glanced at the tablet. "Forty three confirmed. Conte Riccardo Albanese, Don Ferrante Lucchesi, Ambassador Orsini, the usual crowd. Plus the entertainment." He paused slightly. "A pianist. Someone new, not from the regular roster. The events coordinator sourced her separately."

I looked up briefly. "Name?"

Marco checked. "Liora Vale."

The name meant nothing to me. I nodded and went back to the numbers.

By seven in the evening I was done with the office. I took the elevator up to my penthouse on the top floor of the same building, the one place in Milan that was entirely mine, no business associations, no guests, no performance required. I showered, stood at the mirror and shaved carefully, then dressed. The black tuxedo Marco had arranged was pressed and precise. I arranged my hair, applied cologne sparingly, and checked my reflection once before leaving the room. Not out of vanity. Out of habit. The image had to be right. Calm. Composed. Untouchable. Every piece of the man I had built firmly in place.

The limousine was waiting at the building's private exit. My driver Enzo held the door without a word and I got in and the city began moving past the tinted windows in its usual blur of lights and noise. The drive to the estate took forty minutes on a clear night.

The Moretti estate sat on elevated ground on the outskirts of Milan, all stone and iron and old architecture that had been restored to something between a private residence and a statement. I used it on weekends mostly, for events like tonight, for the kind of business that required beautiful rooms and expensive wine and the appearance of a man with deep roots and older money. During the week I stayed at the penthouse. The estate was a backdrop. A tool. Nothing more.

I had no family to fill it with anyway.

There was a gap in my history where family should have been, a blank space I had long since stopped trying to fill with imagination. I knew only that I had woken up in a dark room at nineteen with no memory, no name, and no face I recognised in the mirror. The men who found me had given me a name, resources, and eventually an opening that I turned into an empire through sheer force of will and the particular coldness that comes from having nothing to lose. Who my family was, whether they were alive, whether they were looking for me or had stopped looking, I did not know. I had taught myself not to think about it too often. Thinking about it changed nothing.

Inside, the gala moved the way these things always moved. People standing and talking about things that mostly concerned money. I moved through it easily, stopping where I needed to stop, shaking hands with men I respected and men I didn't.

I was standing near the far end of the room in conversation with Conte Riccardo Albanese, an older man with silver hair and the measured confidence of someone who had survived four decades in rooms like this one, when he leaned slightly closer and said in low Italian:

"Hai sentito parlare dell'accordo Castellano? Dicono che qualcuno stia raccogliendo informazioni."

Have you heard about the Castellano agreement? They say someone is gathering information.

I kept my expression neutral. "Ho sentito," I replied. "Non mi preoccupa." I have heard. It doesn't concern me.

He studied me for a moment the way older men study you when they are deciding whether you mean what you say. Then he nodded slowly, satisfied.

And that was when she began to play.

The first notes came and I stopped talking mid sentence. Not gradually. Not politely. Just stopped, the way you stop when something reaches inside you without asking permission. Albanese was still speaking. I heard none of it. I turned and looked at her.

She was small. Delicate in the way certain people are delicate, not fragile but precise, like something that had been made carefully. Her hands moved across the keys with a certainty that was completely at odds with how out of place she looked in this room full of old money and older secrets. She hummed softly along with the melody, almost to herself, and that sound, that particular combination of her voice beneath the music, did something I was entirely unprepared for.

It reached somewhere inside me that I did not know was still accessible.

Like a door I had forgotten existed being pushed open from the other side.

I watched her for the entire performance without moving. Albanese drifted away at some point and I didn't notice him go. When the last note faded and the polite applause came I watched her stand and smooth her dress and walk toward the hallway at the side of the room. I followed at a distance.

I watched an assistant hand her an envelope. Watched her open it, her face change completely, out of excitement. Her eyes went wide and then soft and she stood very still holding that cheque like she was afraid that if she moved it might disappear.

Something about that tightened my chest in a way I didn't expect and my lips curved into a small smile.

I moved closer.

"You play beautifully," I said.

She looked up and for just a second, before she composed herself, I saw it. That same flicker of something unnameable, like a recognition that had no logical source.

"Thank you," she said. Her voice was steady. I noticed that she worked to make it so.

"I feel like I have heard you somewhere before," I said. I didn't plan to say it. It came out because it was true and I have never seen the point in saying things that aren't.

Something moved across her face. Quick, almost hidden, gone before I could read it properly. She shook her head lightly and gave me a small polite smile that didn't reach her eyes and said she didn't think so. That she would remember.

I looked at her for a moment longer than was necessary.

Soon after, she said goodbye and left.

I waited until she had left the building before I pulled out my phone and called Marco.

"Liora Vale," I said when he picked up. "I want everything. Background, family, where she trained, every performance she has ever given. Have it on my desk by tomorrow morning."

A brief pause on his end. "Understood, boss."

I stepped outside into the cool night air and stood there for a moment before getting into the limousine. My driver pulled away from the estate and the lights of the building shrank behind us as we moved back toward the city. I sat in the back in silence, watching Milan reassemble itself through the window, and I let the feeling sit in my chest without trying to explain it.

Liora Vale.

Her voice beneath that melody. The way her hands moved. The way something in me had leaned toward her before my mind had any say in the matter.

I didn't know why she felt familiar. I didn't know why a woman I had never met could make me feel like I was standing at the edge of a memory I couldn't quite reach.

But I intended to find out.